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“... do they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig, but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour ...”

“... poem, novel, film, play, painting, opera or ballet for longer than two paragraphs, and readers can be forgiven for feeling a bit disoriented as they travel to the chapter’s next destination. Hall gives just one page to Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, where W.B. Stanford, in The Ulysses Theme (1954), which Hall cites on her first ...”

“... and often strenuously. He sleeps out, on mountains and moors. He walks arduously, along coasts and by holloways. He has spent months in our wild places from Sutherland and the Outer Hebrides to the extremities of Wales. He visits them, rather than living in them. He goes out of a strong feeling for nature, as a professional observer and writer – one who ...”

“... are as remote as ever. Nineteenth-century democrats knew that having an election every year would be clumsy and time-consuming (the US House of Representatives, which does it every two years, is proof of that). But they thought the alternatives were probably worse. Without regular elections politicians would drift into self-serving cliques that pursued their ...”

“... I never thought I would find myself writing warmly about a book by a Scottish laird. Adam Nicolson owns the Shiant Islands, east of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The Shiants are a compact cluster and, like all small islands, offer the marvellous sense that you can encompass them, you can easily walk or sail round them and get to know each rock-face or sand-bar, each vein of water or peat-hagg lip ...”

“... as an afterthought’. A rash of Tatler imitators gave way to more nationally minded miscellanies by the mid-century, but the first golden age of the Irish magazine was the 1790s. Journals such as Anthologia Hibernica and the Microscope confidently addressed the world of Addisonian Enlightenment and gentlemanly antiquarianism, though pedlars of ...”

“... called out in alarm: a swift had crashed to the ground just outside the back door, struck down by a sparrowhawk: it gave one gasp and died, and I buried it at the end of the garden. Encounters with birds have enriched my life, whether it was the golden eagle spiralling silently upwards a few yards below me in a corrie of Beinn Alligin in Torridon, or a ...”

“... out to fit pretty well with the outcome their models might have predicted. It was always going to be hard for an insider to succeed at the end of a two-term Democratic administration. The Electoral College gave certain in-built advantages to a Republican who was able to pick up votes in the right places. The state of the economy – neither hot nor cold but ...”

“... Chaplin​ had already starred in 41 films before he became an icon, universally recognisable by his appearance, mannerisms and pattern of behaviour. A lot happens in these films, mostly having to do with the hero’s pursuit of basic needs (food, money, sex, status) through the exercise of a kind of flighty, Zen belligerence. In Kid Auto Races at Venice ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... gave a speech in his Sedgefield constituency in which he sought to justify his actions in Iraq by emphasising the unprecedented threat that global terrorism poses to the civilised world. He called this threat ‘real and existential’, and argued that politicians had no choice but to confront it ‘whatever the political cost’. This is because the ...”

“... the Weimar constitution, Articles 17 and 22 of which established that all federal elections should be conducted according to the principle of proportional representation – was such a disaster. What Britain lacks is not a written constitution, but a codified one. Codification – or what King calls ‘Constitutions with a capital C’ – joins all the ...”

“... most of them unarmed, that have surfaced in the last three years. Some of these videos were made by passers-by or bystanders; their profane, disbelieving remarks can be heard as they comment on what is happening before them. Some of the other videos were shot ...”

“... much as we do. His subject is Pretending. There are those among us who felt our lives were shaped by the balanced but enigmatic Grant, even as we knew (without understanding properly) that this tanned Mr Lucky, a Beverly Hills rake, had once been Archie Leach, a pale kid from a cold, unhappy home in Bristol.That was the magical cut in his career. It isn’t ...”

“... century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even ...”